Category Archives: Burka/Hijab/Veil

The edict issued by the Permanent Committee for Edicts (Fatwa), and Saudi Arabia’s senior cleric Saleh Al Fawzan that exposing the face of a woman is a strict pudenda like exposing her private parts, has sparked a wave of resentment and furor in social media, TV channels and among muslims.

He said a woman must cover her face as a beautiful woman is distinguished from the ugly one by her face. He added, “Poets always compose poems on the faces of women,” he said.

“A muslim woman must hide her face from men, and she should not consider the controversies of the skeptics , and turn a deaf eye to them saying there is a difference between the Muslim scholars, and a man has the right to divorce his wife, if she refuses to veil her face”, he noted.

This film is a beautifully shot, well scripted video, 47 minutes long and worth every minute.

The video shows how the Islamic salafis use madrassas to train the Afghani girls to be virtual slaves who are ignorant of anything but the Quran. These girls live only to bring others to follow sharia law and the Koran and please their men, then are shoved out of sight, literally, into a Saudi black bag. These girls practice pure Islam, directly from the Koran and Sunnah of Mohammed.

By all estimates, it’s a minority of diaspora Muslim women in Europe and Great Britain that appear in public with their faces and bodies totally veiled. The exact number is difficult to document yet there are just enough of them on the street to bother and intimidate some of us.

The result is an aggressive debate that just won’t go away. The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled in favor of France’s law banning full face veiling in public. There is also a legal ban in Belgium and in the Italian-speaking region of Ticino, Switzerland. As the movement gains momentum in Europe, there is now a petition campaign in Great Britain to get 100,000 signatures, enough to force a parliamentary debate on the subject.

I think that if Muslim women in Europe and Britain want to wear head coverings, they should. It shows that they are proud members of the religious, cultural and political civilization of Islam. But if they don’t, they shouldn’t be coerced into it.

Islamic State, the al-Qaeda offshoot that seized large swathes of northern Iraq last month, has warned women in the city of Mosul to wear full-face veils or risk severe punishment.

The Sunni insurgents, who have declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria and have threatened to march on Baghdad, also listed guidelines on how veils and clothes should be worn, part of a campaign to violently impose their radical brand of Islam.

“The conditions imposed on her clothes and grooming was only to end the pretext of debauchery resulting from grooming and overdressing,” said the Islamic State in a statement.

“This is not a restriction on her freedom but to prevent her from falling into humiliation and vulgarity or to be a theater for the eyes of those who are looking.”

[ . . . ]

The Islamic State provided guidelines on how women should dress in Mosul, one of Iraq’s biggest cities. The hands and feet must be covered. Wear shapeless clothes that don’t hug the body. No perfume.

The insurgents run vice patrols in Mosul which answer to a morality committee which has shut Mosul’s college of fine arts and physical education, knocked down statues of famous poets and banned smoking and waterpipes.

Women have been told to never walk unaccompanied by a male guardian. The Islamic State even ordered shopkeepers to cover their store mannequins with full-face veils.

Islamist group al-Shabaab, which controls much of southern and central Somalia, has begun imposing clothing restrictions on women en masse, arresting as many as one hundred women this week for not complying with its fundamentalist dress code.

The women were arrested in a market in Buale, a town southwest of Mogadishu. According to those reports, the women were detained for a short time and threatened with whipping should they not comply with al-Shabaab and wear a niqab – the more involved head covering which leaves open only space for a woman’s eyes.

The women, BBC reports, were released because it was their “first offense,” but they were warned that a second such arrest would result in physical abuse. Dress code for Islamist militants in the area, BBC adds, becomes more difficult to impose as the weather turns warmer, with summer heat reaching extremely high temperatures.

The niqab is not Sunna. These jihadists are the dregs of the male gender obliterating the female, literally defacing her as if she were a stone statue, taking away her personality, taking away her very humanity. This is not the sting of the glass ceiling, the snub of the good ole boy network. This is true oppression. This is the real war on women that progressives deny is happening.

When you see a woman in your town wearing a burqa, does it make you feel invaded? If so, does that mean you are an intolerant racist? Does that mean you are a narrow-minded bigot?

Let me ask you another question: If you see a nun in your town wearing a nun’s habit, do you feel invaded? If you see a Tibetan Buddhist monk in your town wearing monk robes, do you feel invaded? If not, then “narrow-minded bigot” and “intolerant racist” must miss the mark. Something else is causing you to feel invaded when you see a woman in a burqa.

A burqa is a visible sign indicating that the wearer is following a particular ideology. If we see a Catholic nun in a Catholic nun habit, we can guess with a high degree of certainty what ideology she follows. If we see a Tibetan monk with a shaved head and a saffron robe, we can guess with a high degree of certainty what ideology he is following. If we see a man who has shaved his head and has a swastika tattooed on his neck, we can guess with a high degree of certainty what ideology he follows.

A Sudanese woman accused of “indecent” attire because she refused to cover her hair remains in legal limbo after a court appearance on Monday.

Amira Osman Hamid faces a possible whipping if convicted of violating Sudan’s laws governing morality, which took effect after the 1989 Islamist-backed coup by President Omar Al Bashir.

The defence asked in September that the charge be withdrawn but the prosecution is still weighing how to proceed, Amira and one of her lawyers said after Monday’s hearing in Jebel Aulia, just outside Khartoum.

The court is waiting for the prosecutor to either send the file back to court for additional hearings, or to quash the case, Amira said.

A Toronto woman is fighting for her right to wear a niqab – a veil worn by some Muslim women that covers the entire face except for the eyes – while she testifies in a sex abuse case.

The woman, known only as N.S., says the alleged sexual abuse occurred 15 years ago by family members including her uncle and another male relative. Defence lawyers had argued that without seeing her face, they were not prepared to concede she was the victim.The defence also argued that her demeanor could be “inhibited” by the veil, but the Crown said that’s an assumption.

A Saudi newspaper says the kingdom’s religious police are now allowing women to ride motorbikes and bicycles but only in restricted, recreational areas.

The Al-Yawm daily on Monday cited an unnamed official from the powerful religious police as saying women can ride bikes in parks and recreational areas but they have to be accompanied by a male relative and dressed in the full Islamic head-to-toe abaya.